In display devices using guest-host liquid crystals, a dichroic dye serving as guest molecules may be mixed with host molecules of a liquid crystal layer, and the arrangement of the host and guest molecules is changed due to a voltage applied to liquid crystals, thereby causing a change in the light absorptivity of the liquid crystal layer.
For example, when a rod-shaped dichroic dye is used as the guest molecules, the dichroic dye has a property of being aligned parallel to the host molecules. Therefore, when an electric field is applied to change the alignment of the host molecules, an alignment direction of the dichroic dye may also be changed according to the host molecules.
There have been various attempts to use a reflective display device using such guest-host liquid crystals for reflective mirrors.
Such a reflective device is typically realized in a block mode (black mode) in a state in which an external electric field is not applied due to the arrangement of liquid crystals horizontally aligned in guest-host liquid crystals. In this case, the reflective device has a problem such as an increase in power consumption since an electric field is continuously applied to realize a transmission mode (white mode). Also, the reflective device has a problem in that haze occurs due to alignment of disordered liquid crystals when the alignment of the liquid crystals is changed from a horizontal alignment mode to a vertical alignment mode.